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This is a talk I gave at Strathclyde University Feminist Research Network on the politics of accessibility. In it, I argue that there’s a conflict between, on the one hand, liberal approaches to accessibility that aim to include the disenfranchised in an existing world, and, on the other hand, radical approaches to accessibility that aim to transform the world by centering minoritised groups. I analyse access policy, safer spaces policy, some of my own work in arts accessibility, and at the end take a quick look at trans approaches to disclosure and non-disclosure to argue for the potential of forms of exclusion. Scholars whose analysis I engage with include Robert McRuer, Elizabeth Povinelli and Sara Ahmed.

This is an early exploratory talk, beginning to think through some ideas, rather than the conclusion of research. Your thoughts, criticisms and engagements are very welcome.

Many thanks to Dr Maddie Breeze for the invitation and suggestion, and the SUFRN for excellent hosting and conversation.

The video includes the slides and audio, which are also available separately. The full transcript is below.

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Introductions

[Talking about myself and giving an outline of the lecture]

Any other admin? No, I don’t think so. Good!

So this is me. My job, my role in the world, is as a writer and performer. I work mostly in poetry, but also intersecting with theatre, live performance, games, and a bunch of other stuff. And that journey, at the moment, has taken me into doing a creative writing PhD — because when else in the world am I going to get paid by the government to write a book for three years? Very exciting. I’ll think about a book for three years — who gets to do that? Wonderful. That PhD is in minority languages, specifically Scots, and looking at the role of speculative poetry — science fiction poetry, fantasy, imagination — in minority language globally.

So it has nothing to do with what we’re talking about today, and I say that to emphasise that, what I’m talking about today, I come to not really as an academic researcher. That’s not my field of research within the academy, but it is a big chunk of my field as practice, as an artist, and through my own political engagements. So my thinking, my positionality for today, is coming at it as a practitioner more than as a formal researcher. And that’s possibly me feeling a bit impostory saying that! But it’s also just to try and locate where I’m coming at you… coming at it for you… coming… coming at it with you? I don’t know. One of those prepositions. So you have a sense of that!

So the political affinities that I’ve brought to that, and my political background, which is as relevant to this as my artistic background, is a lifelong, or adult lifelong involvement in various autonomous political movements, direct action movements, starting out in environmental direct action. I was very involved in the last few years of Climate Camp and some more local stuff in Scotland. And then, more recently, the stuff that I tend to be involved with in Scotland is stuff around No Borders work, asylum seeker solidarity, the little bit of anti-fascism that we need in Scotland, just to try and keep them down and stop them getting any kind of size. (Antifascist protests are really nice in Scotland because it’s like the one time you feel like you get to win like all the time. It’s quite nice.) [Ed: I think you should stop making this joke given the global rise of fascism. Lets have a conversation about the relationship between the relative absence of street antifascism in Scotland and Scotland’s participation in ongong British imperialism and the failure of antifascist tactics to address this. Anyway. Onwards:] And then also stuff around trans health. So, that’s the sort of political milieu that I’m coming to this from, which will be relevant in a little bit.

And what to do: I’m going to cover four areas around ideas of access and inclusion, and also exclusion — both the positives and negatives of excluding — and I’m going to start by looking specifically at accessibility policies, policies around disability inclusion, disability access, and then flip over into the arts world. I want to look at a couple of pieces of work I’ve done around disability and the arts, to look at that from a different end. So I’m going to be looking at education access, starting with access in education, and then looking at disability in the arts, and then, moving back to this policy work, thinking about the wonderfully contested issue of Safer Spaces policies within, primarily, academic spaces, but also where those have come from politically, and then, moving back, I want to look at some artistic engagements around deliberate exclusion.

And I suppose the provocation that I want to make with this talk, or the angle that I want to take, is to look at some of the ways that inclusion operates against marginality, against anti-oppression work, and some forms of exclusion by the margins rather than exclusion of the margins. Choosing, from the margins, not to let people in can be exciting, interesting, full of potential, and that’s the double meaning of the title for me: access means it’s not for you. So looking at how access policy can be deployed to keep people out, and also how a more radical approach to access can also be, in a more positive way, about keeping people out, and what that might be. So that’s what we’re going to cover.

[00:04:40]
Access Liberalism

Critically assessing access policies at the University of Strathclyde and the Open University, and using Robert McRuer’s “compulsory able-bodiedness” and Elizabeth Povinelli’s “late liberalism” to analyse them.

Access at Strathclyde

Good! So I want to start with that first section, Access Liberalism, and looking at how accessibility operates as a liberal ideology, and what the contradictions of that are. So I thought the best place to start, when I was preparing this talk, was with Strathclyde’s disability accessibility policy, which you can find at this link, the overarching principles of which begin.

“The University of Strathclyde is committed to the promotion of equal opportunities for disabled people and aims” — aims — “to create an inclusive environment that enables full participation in the University experience and offers disabled staff, students and visitors where reasonably practicable an experience comparable to non-disabled people.” So those are the overarching principles currently governing access at the University of Strathclyde.

There’s a few things I want to draw out from this. (To be a little fair to this policy, this is just the principles bit, and as with all access policies, as with all policies anywhere, the real meat of it is less in the broad philosophical statement and much more in what’s down there in the nitty-gritty. And if you’re interested in that work, I think a deep analysis of the nitty gritty is much more important, and what I’m about to chat about is very broad surface level.)

The first thing that interests me about the wording here is “full participation in the University experience”. Mostly because I’m not sure what that experience is? The policy invokes this thing, The University Experience. It’s a pre-existing thing that we’re trying to get disabled people into. The implication is that is that disabled people are currently excluded from The University Experience, and this policy operates to bring them into this pre-existing thing. I’m not entirely sure what that University Experience is supposed to be, and I think it’s worth unpacking the assumptions that are going on there. The University Experience that we’re trying to get people to participate in is by implication something that disabled people aren’t in already. It is an abled University Experience by the definitions of this policy. So what kind of learnings are going on in there? And why would disabled people want access to that thing that been defined around them?

A little bit more specifically — you’ll probably have already noticed this — the killer adverbs and adjectives in this policy statement are “reasonable” and “comparable”. So the University of Strathclyde “is committed to the promotion of equal opportunities for disabled people” and “aims to create an inclusive environment”, except it doesn’t. It only does that “where reasonably practicable”. So this statement of access starts by pretending that it says that it wants to enable access for everyone, and then only towards the end of the statement says, actually, we’re not interested in access for everyone. We’re only interested in access where it’s reasonably practicable. So we have this killer bit of what I’m going to talk about as “non-performativity” later, which is a term from Sara Ahmed. (I’m just going to park “non-performative” for now because I’m going to talk about it in more detail later.)

The “reasonable” word there, for people who are access geeks, is directly from UK legislation, and it’s often used in international legislation. All workplaces and public institutions are required to enable access for disabled people and to make “reasonable adjustments”. The term, the legal term, is “reasonable adjustments”, and I’m interested in what work that word “reasonable” is doing there.

You find out what work “reasonable” is doing when you ask for one of those adjustments to be made. You go to your manager, your line manager, your HR department, and say, “In order to work at this place, I need this ramp. I need to be able to wear headphones in the office. I need to sit by a window. I need time off for counselling, for an appointment that I can only get at this specific time in a week.” And then your HR manager says, “No, I don’t think that’s reasonable”. And then you have to have a contest with your HR manager where you say, “This is reasonable”, and they say, “It’s not reasonable”, and you have to try and win that contest. And that contest is won not only through a process of reasoning — of doing the process of reasoning and arguing and saying, the reason I need it is this, this is reasonable because this, it’s not reasonable to do this.

It’s also a legal process: what institutional resources can you get behind you? What economic resources, what legal resources can you get behind you, to do the process of reasoning to say that this adjustment is reasonable. The term “reasonable adjustments” exposes that reasoning is, and always is, an economic and legal process as much as it’s a rational process. The rationality is pushed through, through legal, personal, social, endless, endless work to make this reasonable thing happen. So that’s what “reasonably practicable” means there. It pretends to be this neutral statement, but what it actually is, is to create an area of contestation, not only to enable disabled people to get what they need, but to enable the institution to refuse. The shadow is always there: the shadow of saying, “We’re only going to do this where it’s reasonable” is so that you can say “this is unreasonable”.

And then the same work — and I won’t do this in as much detail — the same work is then done by “comparable” in the next clause. The statement starts by saying we’re committed to the promotion of equal opportunities. We’re not going to create an inclusive environment. We’re just going to “aim” to create an inclusive environment. So that’s the third — what’s the opposite of an intensifier? — the third thing to make this less functional. You’re not going to do it: you’re just going to aim to do it. You’re only going to do it when it’s reasonable, and you’re not actually going to do the thing: you’re going to try and do a thing that’s comparable to the thing.

So this statement of principles is not actually an accessibility statement. It’s an non-accessibility statement. It’s a statement to give space for a University to not do the work of accessibility happening. I called them here “pliable non-specifics”, which I think is unnecessarily obfuscatory as a term. What I mean by that is that they’re pliable — there is no definition of reasonable, there is no definition of comparable — they are things that you can move with your hands, with the law, with a pile of money, to change what they mean, and they’re non-specific so that you can do that.

What’s going on in this whole statement overall is a specific contradiction that characterises, I think, all liberal ideology, which is a contradiction between the promise of full participation and the always-present admission that that’s impossible. The statement says that it wants to include everyone, and then in the same breath, literally in the same sentence, it says, but we know that’s not possible. So we’re only going to do it when it’s reasonable, and we’re not going to enable full participation: we’re going to give a comparable experience. And this is a contradiction I’m going to unpack a bit more in a bit. And non-performative I’ll leave for now because we’re going to come back to it.

(I could have picked any University and it would have been a bit like this. So I’m not I’m not bashing where I am, and I’m quite grateful to be here, but I think it’s nice to start with the ground where you are.)

[00:12:25]
Access at the Open University

This is the Open University’s equivalent statement, and I’ve linked to both of these policies in the slides so that you can compare the nitty-gritty, which is less dissimilar, I think, than the principles make clear. Before this, the Open University in their policy has an interesting preamble about how they have the highest proportion of disabled students of any University, which is something that’s shaping this policy. The Open University defines itself as a university for disabled people, which is interesting.

So, “The Open University’s mission of being open to people, places, methods and ideas” — that’s its overarching Mission — “reflects our commitment to supporting all of our students to achieve success in Higher Education regardless of background, circumstances or disabilities. Our aim is to reach students with life-changing learning that meets their needs and enriches societies. We embrace Equal Opportunities for all” — we’re not just going to do an Equal Opportunities policy because we have to legally, we embrace it — “within a diverse and inclusive environment.” — we’re not just aiming for diversity: we’re saying we are already diverse — “which recognises and responds to the needs of all of our students. This policy sets out our commitment to supporting all of our students in ways that effectively meet their needs, and aligns with the Student Charter and with the OU’s overall strategies such as the Students First Strategy, the Equality Scheme, the Learning and Teaching Vision and Plan, the Widening Access and Success Strategy, and the Academic Strategy.” Ooof! That’s a lot of strategies.

So, some of the problems the things that I unpacked in the default language are better dealt with here. We can see that this is much more far-reaching and positive language. Honestly, I felt that the previous vision statement had this sort of begrudging element to it, where it was like, we have to do this stuff legally, so we’re just going to put this statement out there. Whereas this one is having a push at saying, this is a big part of our vision for the University.

But I think there’s still some contradictions in there that are interesting to look at, the first of which relates to this question of The University Experience. We’ve got, I think, four “all”s. Every time they mention students they say “all” of our students, and they also want equal opportunities for “all” within a diverse and inclusive environment. And what I’m interested in is how they can promise that. How can they meet the needs for “all” of their students? And what happens when “all” meets the limits of what they’re able to do? What happens when the University meets the limits of society?

The Open University, because of the economic structure that it has, because of the way it operates, is trying to set itself up to be a university for people who can’t study full-time, who have disabilities that disrupt education in all sorts of different ways, for people on lower incomes. It is structuring itself around that, but it can’t by itself address the fact of living in a society that that systemically denies people the resources that they need to live.

So when they say, “We want to support all of our students to achieve success in Higher Education”, what happens when circumstances outside of the University’s control, or within the University’s control but beyond their capacity, deny students that success? What happens when they don’t succeed? What happens when they fail and whose fault is it? Usually it’s considered, socially, the fault of the student. And what happens if they have an injury that takes them out of the university and the university can’t do that? What happens if they have their benefits cut and they can’t continue with the education? Whose failure is that, and what responsibility does the university have in that circumstance? What happens when the university is rubbing against society, making all of these promises of inclusion for all, and then it literally cannot keep those promises economically and socially?

The University’s answer to this is to have five or six different strategies to try and deal with all of the contradictions that their promise throws up. I think there are six strategies there that it’s naming, and this is a sort of juridical and managerial approach to liberalism. If we have enough strategies, if we have enough policies, if we lay down enough rules, if we lay down enough visions and aims and strategies and approaches, if we name reality in enough ways than reality will become this thing that we want it to become. And that’s what I am terming “Access Liberalism”. It’s this managerial approach to access where you can you can deal with the problems that thinking about accessibility inevitably throws up, which is that the resources that you need are not there within your institution, within society, through enough policies to do it.

[00:17:45]
Robert McRuer’s “compulsory able-bodiedness”

So that was a little bit of an analysis just of two statements, and I want to look at the broader political context for that. And this starts with a quote from Robert McRuer, who wrote a fantastic book called Crip Theory, which has become quite foundational, and it’s an attempt to apply some of the learning and strategies of Queer Theory to a Disability Studies context. McRuer takes the concept of compulsory heterosexuality and then asks, what is compulsory able-bodiedness? And one of the ways that he defines it as this the system of compulsory able-bodiedness “repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, ‘Yes, but in the end wouldn’t you rather be like me?'”

So, we could consider this quote in the in the context of the Paralympics, where the hyperachieving, incredibly successful, overcoming, boundary-smashing disabled athlete achieves, through all of their impressive work and overcoming of life’s struggles, what an abled athlete could do. We’re impressed because they are embodying what an abled athlete could do. In the end wouldn’t you rather be like me? You can do what I can do. That’s so impressive. Well done.

(That’s very cynical way of putting it. I actually love the Paralympics, and I’m endlessly delighted, and I also think there’s all sorts of agencies and possibilities within that frame. When you actually listen to Paralympic athletes, they all have a hyper awareness of this stuff going on — not all, I shouldn’t say that — they often have a hyperawareness of this stuff going on, and are looking for their own agency within that.)

But from the able-bodied perspective that is often the ideology that’s going on there: asking people to embody the affirmative answer to the unspoken question. And accessibility, for me, is an example of compulsory able-bodiedness: it maintains an abled view of the world, because in this word “access” what we’re asking for is for disabled people to access what already exists. It’s allowing groups of people to access what already exists within reasonable — within reason: if it’s reasonable, if they can reason their way through it — and managed by the appropriate institution with all those strategies and policies and aims, rather than processes of transformation.

Accessibility isn’t a process of transforming an institution, a process of transforming a society, but getting a group that’s hitherto been excluded access to what already exists, and thereby prevents the the institution from transforming. If you can continue bringing more people in, if more people can access your institution, your society, your business, your ideology, then your institution — your ideology — doesn’t have to change, because all of the problems are dealt with by bringing more people into that pre-existing thing.

What I want to ask, of both education and the arts, is, what happens if you flip that narrative around and say, what if the job of education, what if the job of accessibility, is not to give people access that don’t have access access to what already exists, but to change what already exists by centering it around said marginalized group? And the question there, the provocation there, is, what would an education centered on disability look like? What if instead of insisting that we have ramps and lifts in every building — which we should insist and absolutely need — we ask how can buildings be designed from the start around people who need wheels? What if the social structures on which university is based — the lecture, the seminar, the informal discussion, the staff meeting — is based not on a neurotypical form of sociality but on an autistic form of sociality? What happens if course requirements are based not on a set of increasingly exhausting metrics, but on what somebody who has some form of chronic fatigue, or even just any form of fatigue that comes with having a disability, what if it’s based around that? What if the schedules are based around that rather than based on what a compulsory able-bodied perspective demands? So those are the questions.

[00:22:25]
John Gray’s analysis of liberalism

I’ve talked a lot about liberalism, so I wanted to define it a little bit. I like I like listening to my enemies’ definitions first, because I think that’s quite interesting. I love going to John Gray on liberalism, even though he disgusts me. This is John Gray’s repeated and lifelong definition of liberalism: “For the ideal of toleration we have inherited embodies two incompatible philosophies. Viewed from one side, liberal toleration is the ideal of a rational consensus on the best way of life; from the other, it is the belief that human beings can flourish in many ways of life.”

And this central contradiction John Gray comes back to over and over and over again in his work: the idea that liberalism wants there to be a rational consensus: “we bring everyone together, we have an enormous democratic process, and we live together in the society where we’ve rationally decide how we want to live,” and at the same time it says, “and everyone can come into that thing.”

Those two things are always rubbing against each other, for John Gray, and I think he’s right that they rub against each other. I also think that most people from different political perspectives are willing to accept some version of that contradiction. From the right, they’ll often say, yes, liberalism is contradictory in this way, and so we need to recenter this particular form of morality, this particular hierarchy. We should stop trying to bring everybody into this thing because that’s contradictory. Let’s re-establish a certain moral framework in the world. Liberals themselves will often say, our whole political process, our managerial political process, is about managing this contradiction, doing the best we can in any particular situation. And then chippy people like me will be like, yes, this is the central contradiction of liberalism that demands an entire upending of the State in order for justice to occur. So I like working with that.

What happens when liberalism meets this contradiction? I think the first thing it tends to do is deny that the contradiction is there: that type of person does not exist. This is the first move that any liberal institution would make, to deny that that thing is there. “Trans people don’t exist. Let’s not worry about them. They don’t actually exist.” And then you accept that they exist, but you say: “We can’t really have them in our institution. They’re not really allowed to be here.” So if you can’t deny, then you exclude. If you can’t exclude, then you can say, “We accept that they… we don’t really like them. We accept that they exist. We accept that they’re there. We tolerate them. We have tolerance for them. If they must be in our spaces then we’ll tolerate that they’re there.” And if you stop being able to do that because of a move of social and political forces, then you might begin to adapt to allow them in. You might install some gender neutral bathrooms. “We’re going to adapt this institution.” You’re going to change the entire institution, but you’re going to adapt to the institution so that you can cope with this new demographic that you’ve previously denied, excluded, accepted.

If that isn’t enough, then you can move towards strategies of assimilation, where you integrate enough of the hitherto marginalized demographic to maintain the existing hegemony. You allow them to be a junior partner in the hegemonic process, which I would argue is what has happened to a rump of LGBT politics over the last 50 years. That, from a set of radical demands, it has moved towards a generally assimilationist approach, so that LGBT people can become junior partners in business. Every so often one of them might be an executive, you know. They’re there and we accept them and we’ve adapted to them enough and they can be part of our ideology that has hitherto excluded them. That for me is how liberalism operates.

[00:26:15]
Elizabeth Povinelli’s “late liberalism”

This is Elizabeth Povinelli saying a version of the same thing in Economies of Abandonment, using the term “late liberalism”. “Late liberalism makes a space for culture to care for difference without disturbing key ways of configuring experience: ordinary habitual truths.”

So that’s this claim about a civilization, that’s this claim about how late liberalism works. And what I’m trying to say is that accessibility, as a policy, tolerates — “cares for” in Povinelli’s terms — accessibility, cares for enough disability, to maintain the habitual truth of abledness — or what Robert McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodiedness”. So we can maintain a view of the world, or an approach to designing society, that assumes everyone is able-bodied, despite the fact that, if the majority of people aren’t already disabled, then they will be eventually. Despite that basic element of existence we maintain the habitual truth of abledness by implementing accessibility.

And so I come with this conclusion: accessibility policies are non-performative –I’ll come back to that later — non-performative utopias of inclusion. Utopia, as Thomas More writes — it originally is a deliberate pun, the etymology means both “no place” and “happy place”, it means both of those things at once. So, a happy no-place where everyone gets the experience that everyone should have. This cannot happen, but the utopia of inclusion says that it does. Everyone gets the experience that everyone should have. And imagining that utopia, having a policy for that utopia, hides everyone who’s not there and the experience that could be. Instead of changing what the experience is, instead of changing what the world is, we try and give access to the world as it already exists.

So that’s my provocation around access. Oof! Okay. I thought I would start with the most theoretical bit, because that’s apparently how one is supposed to structure these things. So I’ll talk about something a little more meaty, concrete, for a bit.

[00:28:34]
Disabled Presenting in Artspace

[Critically analysing accessibility work in Anatomy and the Chill Out Corner]

I want to just look at two projects that I’ve been involved with as an artist who produces other artists. And I’m using this term “presenting”, or “presenting” — what happens when the presentation is done from a disabled perspective, when you are making present disabled people. So I am just going to turn down the lights for a minute so you can see this lovely picture.

[28:50]
BSL at Anatomy Arts

I co-direct an arts platform in Edinburgh called Anatomy. We’ve been going for about six years. This is us hosting one of our events. That’s me on the right. That’s my co-director. Ali Maloney on the left. And that’s our regular BSL — British Sign Language — interpreter Yvonne Waddell in the middle, which is where she always is when the three of us are on stage, which is a deliberate strategy.

Now, if any of you have ever gone to a piece of theatre that has BSL interpretation, you’ll usually find that the BSL interpreter is at the back on the right or the left, or at the front on the right or the left: somewhere where they are very obviously not part of the main piece of action. And one of the things that we try to do with Anatomy, which happens every three months, and which every single event that we do has full BSL interpretation of the whole thing, is to counter that by always bringing Yvonne into the centre of the action. So that this particular form of accessibility, which is where the entire piece is always translated into another language, or interpreted into another language, British Sign Language — where that is centered in how the whole thing is presented aesthetically. So that it’s not just access, it’s not just disability access, but disabled presenting, or disabled presenting.

But! Some of you might have noticed the deep irony of this otherwise beautiful photo. We’re doing this whole thing in front of a bunch of music stands. Did anyone notice this? No, it just passed you by. Now, music is a bit of a problem for disability access, for D/deaf access. Because you can’t hear it? Actually, that’s not quite true. You can do all sorts of interesting things with music, and D/deaf and hard-of-hearing access can do things like putting speakers on the floor so that rhythms can be felt, and especially bass beats can be felt. There’s other interesting things you can do around the visualisation of music. But in this particular case, we didn’t do any of that. We, in that particular show, had this one piece where we could not make this D/deaf accessible.

[00:31:10]

(If anyone doesn’t know this, just as a brief note, this D-slash-deaf: There’s this contest around D/deaf identity, and Deaf with a capital D tends to refer to Deaf identity and Deaf culture, and deaf with a lowercase d tends to refer to deaf, or deaf and hard-of-hearing people, who don’t necessarily identify with that culture. I can talk to you at length length about that if you like. That piece of language is a complicated bit of compromise around the political contest.)

This is our inclusion statement, which can be equally critiqued and equally problematized, that’s framing all of this work. And I wanted to mention this is as something that I’m proud of. This isn’t the only access thing that we do. It’s a thing I’m proud of, but that I also see the limitations of. You’re trying to make a whole set of — and Anatomy is a multi-artforum cabaret, there’s all sorts of different forms of art going on in there. Sound art and music is often a part of that, and we haven’t worked out how to do that. And how to do that within this particular access context creates a contradiction for us, and I think that contradiction is important.

[00:32:25]

So I would ask of us, and of everybody else, what are some of the possible approaches to that? Do we program no art that isn’t fully D/deaf accessible? Do we just not have things that are only music? Because we tend to focus on cross-genre work, we almost never have a piece that is purely sound-based. It’s usually sound and visual, or sound and movement, though there’s still a problem there. Do we just accept no work that doesn’t have a D/deaf accessible component? Do we adapt all art to be D/deaf accessible? Do we only work with musicians if they can do this thing?

Or, do we accept that not every audience member is going to be able to access every aspect of this artform? — so let’s create some art that specifically centered around this disability. And we have done this in the past, where we might have a night that includes a piece of music that not everyone can necessarily enjoy, and then we might have a poem in British Sign Language that we do not interpret into English, deliberately, so that there’s something else where the hearing audience can only appreciate the visual aspect of it, and has really doesn’t know what the language is. So that’s another thing that we can do.

Then what happens if you try and incorporate another level of accessibility — and we haven’t done this yet — when you are trying to be accessible — and again remember this critique of accessibility being inclusion in what already exists rather than transforming what exists. What if we want to be better accessible to a blind audience, or a partially sighted audience? How do we include both BSL interpretation and audio description, which is a form of blind accessibility, into everything that we do? And how do we do that when we are already operating on a shoestring and can barely muster the economic and social resources to make this thing happen?

What I’m trying to suggest is that proper, not access but, integration of this kind of disability access requires not just adding in a thing, not just adding in a BSL interpreter, but complete aesthetic overhaul of what you’re doing. You have to rethink what art is and how art works if you want to do this properly. And that also requires quite a lot of money, which we tend not to have.

The broad question there is — and this is a metaphor as well as a reality — where are the stairs in every theatre? What are the things that some people cannot get past? What kinds of curb-cutting — curb cuts are those ramps in the pavement that were mostly created for people in wheelchairs, but tend to be really useful for everybody else, from skateboarders to people pushing buggies, to people who are having to haul massive loads down the pavement — What curb-cutting does theate need?

[00:35:10]
Chill Out Corner and alternate social space

Just to quickly look at another thing that I’ve done. I’ll turn these lights down again. So my particular — I’ll talk about revelation later, if I’ve got time — my particular disability, or the thing that brings me into this space, is Aspergers. And I am really interested in autistic sociality, and how that rubs up against dominant forms of sociality in the arts. So this is a project that I’ve done iteratively with different arts organizations. (I don’t like the name. I need a new name for it.) It is creating, within big noisy fancy art parties, a corner of the space, or sometimes an entire room, or sometimes half the space, that is calm and quiet and has all sorts of things in it that are quite nice for various different types of autistic people. Some of the things that you can see in this picture are: a book shelf, and some board games, and some nice fabrics (which I could explain another time), and low-level lighting.

[00:36:15]

There’s also some social technologies in this space. Ear protection is a really nice thing to apply to arts parties, because there’s so often really loud music that just drives some people away (some people love it!) And this is the social technology that’s often used at autism conferences: color communication badges. Green means, “Chat to me any time. I’m happy to talk. You can initiate conversation. I can initiate conversation. That’s great.” Yellow is, “I’m sometimes happy to talk, but I’d rather I initiate conversation with you rather than the other way around, just so I can manage it a little bit better.” And red means, “Just don’t talk to me. I’m nonverbal at the moment. I don’t want to speak.”

The reasoning around that is, different autistic people at different levels struggle with different types of social communication. Some autistic people are completely nonverbal, some panic at unexpected social interaction, some need to manage social interaction in specific ways. And this requires — for this to work it requires everybody who’s in that space, autistic or non-autistic, to wear one of these badges. For everyone to say, “This is how I want to communicate in the world.”

This is a piece of social design, a social technology to change what social space is. And it has all sorts of interesting effects. Because it’s not just autistic people that are awkward and uncertain at parties. If everyone around you is wearing a green badge, whether you’re autistic or not, it’s suddenly a little bit easier to be like, “Oh, are you enjoying this party? I didn’t really know how to talk to a person but I see you’re wearing a green badge, so I suppose I’ll give it a shot.” If you’re worried that somebody doesn’t want to talk to you, the fact that they’re just wearing a yellow badge or a red badge is such a massive reduction in anxiety. “Oh, it’s not me. They just don’t want to talk to anyone. I’m fine.”

[00:38:05]

So this is the thing that I said when I was designing this first — I’ve got a page on my website about it — “being professionally social or socially professional is a form of advantage in the art world, but equally many artists are reclusive, shy, awkward, anxious, uncertain, or neurodiverse.” (That’s the term of art that arises from autistic space but has come to other forms of mental difference.) “How can the art world provide social space to many different kinds of people together?”

What I’m doing is using autism-centered design to create an alternate social space alongside and abrading against neurotypical sociality. This is mostly quite a nice cuddly project. But when an arts institution comes to me, and asks me to facilitate one of these spaces at their arts event, I say, “I will totally do that. It can’t just be in a separate room. Everybody else has to know that it’s there and see that it’s there.” It’s a requirement for me that everybody can see that there is a different sort of socialising going on, and that’s a creation of another world alongside the world that already exists, and trying to let those abrasions happen.

Centering design on one minority population shifts the possibilities for all populations, and exposes the compulsory able-bodiedness — that’s Robert McRuer’s term again — of the received space. So what I’m trying to say there is that, by doing this autism-centered thing, you get all of these unexpected benefits for other people. Just as, when you create curb-cuts in as many pavements as possible, it’s suddenly a lot easier for people who are pushing buggies to negotiate the city space. All spaces are already exclusive. There is no hundred percent inclusive space. There is no pure accessible social design. So what we can do instead is make conscious design choices about what and who is excluded.

Some people are not going to find the Chill Out Corner remotely relaxing. “Like, they’re sitting in comfortable armchairs and talking quietly and playing board games? I cannot handle that socialisation.” There are people who could not handle that socialisation, and for me that’s totally fine, because they’ve got a different form of socialisation to go to over there. When you exclude particular people, behaviours and norms — the norm that anyone can just chat to anyone at any time? No we’re going to govern this with this complicated communication badge thing — different people, behaviors and norms can emerge.

[00:40:40]
Unsafer Spaces

Critically assessing safer spaces at Queer Mafia and UWE, and using Sara Ahmed’s “non-perfomativity” to analyse their politics

I want to go back to doing some of this “let’s look at some policy” work, and talk about this often-talked-about, usually misunderstood, very contested issue of safer spaces. I’ve dropped her name a few times, and it’s worth saying that my approach to looking at policy is really informed by Sara Ahmed’s work on non-performativity. She has at least two essays on non-performativity, one of which I link to in the notes here, that are well worth the read, where she looks at Equal Opportunities policies, specifically around racial diversity, and how they work in the nitty-gritty to exclude people of color from the institution being examined. And that’s really shaped my approach to access policy, and in this case safer spaces policy.

[00:41:30]
A Partial History of Safer Spaces

This is my biased, partial — partial in both senses — understanding. My understanding of safer spaces comes from seeing them emerge from the sort of political space that I was used to, like direct action camps and anarchist conferences, and growing up with those 15 years ago, and then in the last five years finding them suddenly be part of, like, articles in The Telegraph. I’m like, when did the Telegraph know about safer spaces? Like, this is a thing that we just did at Climate Camp 15 years ago, this is weird. [Ed: it was 10 years ago. Stop pretending you’re an old.] They’ve become part of a mainstream conversation, and it’s been astonishing and confusing to me how that’s happened, and I’m really interested in that.

My understanding of safer spaces has its origins in transformative justice movements, which has been led by organisations like INCITE!, looking particularly at issues like domestic violence, and all forms of social violence, especially within minority or marginalised community. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence are the most pioneering organisation that I know of in that field, and The Color of Violence: the Incite Anthology is a good text for looking at — the history goes quite a long way back — that’s a good text for looking at the history of it.

Transformative justice is an idea that emerges especially from heavily-policed minority groups, saying, clearly a carceral system, a prison system, a police system is not working for our community. Clearly this is a way of maintaining racial discrimination, impoverishment. Clearly it is not stopping violence in our communities. We need something else. How do we transform justice? What kinds of justice can come from and be led by our communities? It tends — Transformative Justice tends to avoid punitive measures, certainly tends to avoid incarceration and the involvement of the state monopoly of violence, a.k.a. the police, and look for community-facilitated processes of personal and social transformation.

And from that place, through forms of social interaction, it disseminates through various anti-authoritarian activist movements. And an interesting comparator here is consensus decision-making as an ideology, which some of you who have engaged with student activism might have come across. Consensus decision-making can be tracked really closely back to particular moments in peace and anti-nuclear movements, especially with meetings between Quakers and other forms of peace and anti-nuclear movements. You can see conversations about consensus decision-making at Three Mile Island, and you see it come from there and then spread all the way through anti-authoritarian movements, and then from there it comes to the students, and from there you occasionally start to see it at business meetings, and I’m like, what? Like, why are people doing hand signals at this meeting about business strategy?

Anyway, back to safer spaces. So you start finding it in various forms of anti-authoritarian activist movements. The Revolution Starts At Home is again looking at issues of partner violence, intimate partner violence, within those communities. And from there they come into student movements, and, as with lots of things that happen within a student milieu, with new, trendy, youth-aligned arts events.

And in these places I find they tend to move from a processual process — transformative justice is a process of transforming a group, transforming a society, transforming a person — to something that’s more juridical, more based in policy, more based in various forms of law, whether that’s actual national law or internal laws of social groups. And I’ll look at that in a moment. And from there, once it starts being a studenty thing, it becomes this immensely triggering word for all sorts of reactionaries. It’s like, you can say “safe spaces” and suddenly they have a meltdown, and start freaking out about free speech. It’s hilarious. It’s really nice triggering reactionaries by saying just these two words, like “safe space”? Wooah! So, they notice what’s going on and it becomes this trigger that people start talking about in all sorts of confusing and different ways. That’s my partial history of it.

[00:45:50]
Safer Spaces at Queer Mafia

As with the accessibility policies, I want to look at the vision statements of safer spaces. So this is the start of a Safer Spaces Policy from a Dance and DJ event called Queer Mafia. It goes like this. I can’t read the whole thing, but: “Queer Mafia works towards recognizing dynamics of power and privilege that exist within society and which have historically oppressed our communities. We believe that these same dynamics and tensions exist within our own communities, and we are working continuously towards addressing these tensions and creating supportive spaces. Our spaces are not spaces for violence, racism, sexism, ageism, transphobia, sexism, sizism and fatphobia, sexual harassment and gender policing, or doing anything to another person without their consent. […] QM reserves the right to assess and manage circumstances and situations in the best interest of our Collective Vision towards creating ‘liberation’ (in scare quotes) and ‘safer (in scare quotes) spaces’. We don’t believe in Zero Tolerance, but we do believe in accountability and spaces of support.” And it goes on! And I just I want to show you this, and I’m being a bit ironical about it, but I actually think this is incredible. I think this is a beautiful document.

So that’s just the start of this Safer Spaces Policy, and it includes a whole bunch of stuff about how safer spaces policies can’t exist, this whole thing is a contradiction… and then we have a section on anti-racism and anti-oppression, bullying and violence, consent, respect, like, it goes on and on and on and on. It is this incredibly involved set of social guidelines, suggestions around processes, what kind of things they might do if something goes wrong. It’s an entire visionary design of what a social space could be, that they’re trying to describe and name, and through describing and naming it discover that is completely impossible to do that. So that is for me a kind of Safer Spaces Policy that really understands the origins of safe spaces within Transformative Justice movements. It’s going to shift from there.

Some of the aspects of it: it names the kind of problem, so it has a politics, it has a specific politics that is trying to enact through policy, through social design, through establishing social conventions. Names the problem, names the politics, and is process-oriented, is always talking about transformations, always talking about how it’s going to try and implement this stuff. It explicitly excludes behaviors and talks about who is centered. It is centering queer people, is centering people of color. And it is saying, these are not spaces for this stuff, for violence, racism, sexism: It’s excluding behaviors. It’s not including everyone: it’s excluding behaviours.

[00:48:45]

So, to look at what then happens to safer spaces… Here we go. This is from UWE Students’ Union. “This Students’ Union believes: The Students’ Union is committed to providing an inclusive” — there’s that word again — “and supportive space for all students” — not centering particular groups, it’s for all: remember that word “all” from access. “This policy is applicable to our whole student community, whether an individual or a member within a group. […] We all aspire to provide an environment where students can express their views free from discrimination, harassment and bullying. Freedom of speech should be respected as well as recognising its boundaries. We must respect our diverse population and take a zero tolerance approach to discrimination in any term.”

Now, remember that the ostensibly much more radical political statement, that had a really express politics to it, a really express radical politics to it, said “We don’t believe in zero tolerance”. But this, this piece of ridiculously bland liberalism that says nothing, like it literally says nothing, says that it’s going to be “zero tolerance”. So I think that’s really worth thinking about. If you’re processual if, you’re radical about it, if you’re transformative about it, you know that zero tolerance doesn’t work; if you’re trying not to do anything, if you’re trying to be non-performative, then you say you’re going to have a zero tolerance approach.

The reason that I say it says nothing is the contradiction between 3 and 4: it wants everyone to express their views free from discrimination, harassment and bullying, but freedom of speech should be respected, and it has boundaries. These words mean nothing outside of the particular processes of political contestation that are defining what freedom of speech is, what the boundaries of freedom of speech are, what discrimination is, what bullying is, what harassment… It doesn’t define any of the terms, so it means nothing, and just as those terms “reasonableness” and “comparable” in that first accessibility policy are pliable non-specifics — terms of contestation, terms that require political contest, social processes in order to mean anything — we have these pliable boundaries that can be moved around.

If the Students’ Union is dominated by lefties then they’re going to use these pliable terms in order to try and stop inviting, like, I don’t know, Milo Yiannopoulos, to speak at the university. If The Students’ Union is dominated by conservatives then they’re going to use these terms to, probably, and this does happen — and this happened at Bristol — to try and shut down a group of trans students starting a petition. Like, Safer Spaces was invoked in Bristol recently (I’ll look up the details if anyone’s interested) in order to punish a trans student for starting a petition. It’s juridical in orientation. It’s trying to it’s not trying to initiate processes: it’s trying to, by naming a bunch of principles, make those principles happen in reality.

[00:51:45]
Sara Ahmed’s “non-performativity”

Here’s, finally, this definition of non-performative that I keep referring to, and it is what’s going on in that policy. And this is from Sara Ahmed’s ‘Non-performativity of Anti-racism‘:

“Such speech acts do not do what they say. They do not commit a person, organization or state to an action. My argument is simple they are non-performatives.” This term “performative” goes back to the Linguistics researcher Austin, and has a particular role, as you may know, in Queer Theory, and then becomes used by Butler, most notably, in understanding how gender works as a performative act, as a performative speech act. “For Austin, a performative refers to a particular class of speech: an utteranc is performative when it does what it says.” (An example being “I declare thee man and wife”; “I promise I will do this”; “I sentence you to death”: performative statements.)

“I want to suggest that non-performative speech acts work by not bringing about the effects that they name. In my model of the non-performative, the failure of the speech act to do what it says is not a failure of intent or even circumstance, but is actually what the speech act is doing.” (The access policy, the inclusion policy, the safer spaces policy, deliberately works to make a thing not happen.) “Such speech acts work as if they bring about what they name, or, to be more precise, such speech acts are taken up as if they are performative, which has its own effect.” (So we have a diversity policy: therefore we are now diverse, and by having a diversity policy and becoming diverse we don’t have to do anything about diversity. Ditto safer spaces policies, I think. Usually.)

[00:53:25]

Whether or not any given Safer Spaces Policy is non-performative — and I should say that I really believe in safer spaces processes, and I spent five years of my life facilitating transformative justice and safer spaces processes for a social centre in Edinburgh, with a social centre in Edinburgh, as part of a team. I’ve committed a huge amount of personal resources to this, and I still believe in them. But! Whether or not any given safer spaces policy is non-performative depends on conditions not legible in the text: people, processes, expectations. The policy makes nothing happen, and sometimes by having a policy you deliberately stop things from happening.

Safer spaces only occur if there is a team of people willing to actually do something when there’s sexual harassment, willing to actually initiate a process of personal transformation when someone is racist in your activist group. If those people aren’t there, if that experience isn’t there, if the process aren’t there, then just saying “we are anti-racist” means nothing. If you don’t know what to do when somebody does sexual harassment, then saying this isn’t a space for harassment does nothing. It’s not about the policy, it’s about the people that can do something with the policy.

So without those people, without those processes, without that willingness to engage in transformative change, the policy acts as a performative — with a nod to my enemies again — virtue signal that starts the process of making a safe space. So a policy could begin that process, if the people are there to begin that process, but if left as merely a policy it is non-performative. The question here is what happens when something goes wrong. You have a policy, you’ve said “we are a safe space” — as soon as I see those words, I know it’s not a safe space, like if they say “we are a safe space”, I know it’s not going to be a safe space, because it means they’re not going to do anything, because it means they haven’t thought about what if something goes wrong. No space is safe. You can only engage in the process of making a space safer. No space is safer for everyone. You can only engage in a process of making a safe space safer for specific groups of people.

I don’t want my spaces to be safe for white supremacists! Why would I want my prices to be safe for white supremacists? I want to kick them out! I want to exclude them. Right? I’m not making a safer space for everyone, which is what the UWE policy said: I’m deliberately excluding people so that a particular type of person can emerge, so that a particular policy can emerge, so that a particular politics can emerge, and that can only happen through exclusion, not through this utopia of inclusion, but through saying that these behaviors are excluded. That said, we don’t believe in zero tolerance. So, if we have the resources, we engage in a process of transformation. Rather than just kicking everyone out, we would like to work for transformation, but the nitty-gritty of that is a lifetime’s work, and I could talk about that for a long time.

[00:56:20]

I was going to go back to John Gray, but I only have a few minutes left. So, I’m not going to go back to John Gray. Because who wants to listen to more John Gray? So I’m just skipping this bit so we can talk about something else. [Ed: but I’ve left the slides in the video so you can insert your own critique here. The good line is at the end: “The radical demand of safe spaces is masked in a liberal policy of inclusion: has it become the mask, or has it been smuggled in underneath?] Now, I think I’ve said what I want to say about safe spaces. If we have time in the discussion. I’ll talk about John Gray’s reactionary opinion of safe spaces, and how it’s actually quite interesting, but let’s talk about something else.

[00:56:50]
Trans Protocols

[Looking at ways that trans life depends on ambiguous acts of disclosure and non-disclosure, and concluding with the “anti-utopian idealism” of exclusion by the margins.]

So, I want to conclude, with a little bunch of trans stuff, for fun. And I thought, having just ranted at you quite aggressively about safe spaces, we should listen to a little song. Here we go:

[57:50]

I’ll pause it there. “For my change I went south of the border / It took me three days to pack / I had plenty of excess baggage / And a lot less coming back.” So this is Rae Bourbon, an early female impersonator / drag performer / possible trans person. We really do not know how she identified because she identified in a hundred different ways at different points in her career. We do not know if she actually had this operation that she talked about or not. Shortly after Christine Jorgensen had her dramatic revelation of the operation being done, at this hyper-mediatised moment of trans exposure, Rae Bourbon, who had been a long-time, and really very well-known at the time, female impersonator (and that was the term that was used by her and for her at the time) decided to have the operation herself. Or at least said she wanted the operation herself. “The Operation”: we didn’t really know what kind of operation it was. It was “the Operation”.

We don’t really have definite documentation of whether it happened or not. But she started releasing records and doing entire shows about having had an operation, without ever telling you what that operation was, and constantly revealing and concealing what the operation might have been — including in this beautiful song, “Let me tell you about my operation”, which is extremely problematic in the best possible way.

This is a quote from Morgan M Page, who has a trans history podcast called One from the Vaults that is phenomenal and free, and I highly recommend, and maybe start with this episode because it’s hilarious: “Her life story has been so embellished, not least of which by herself, that telling fact from fantasy is now impossible. (These things are definitely all true.) A Broadway actress, singer, convicted murderer (actually true), novelist, and all around entertainer, this person may or may not have been trans.”

I am interested in this — and I know I’ve seems like I’ve gone off on ridiculous tangent right at the end — I am interested in how cultural protocols of hiding and disclosure, which are incredibly familiar to trans people, as well as LGBT people generally, are related to this this idea of Access Liberalism. We have this idea that everyone should be included, that everyone should come along to the thing, that everyone should be safe, which is what I’ve been trying to say can’t happen. And we also have this idea that all information should be possible, should be accessible: information wants to be free — let’s have Wikipedia, let’s have at archive dot org — and I’m interested in what happens when spaces are not safe, when spaces exclude people, and when information is kept from you.

And Rae Bourbon, for me, this drag queen / female impersonator / trans women / whatever, engaged in this lifelong process of lying, making shit up, telling you the truth but making it sound like a lie, telling you she had an operation when she hadn’t, but maybe she had, but you didn’t know — and that process, that performance, that public life, is both of those things at once. It’s the revelation and it’s also the refusal of information. And having both of those things at once, I think, is essential to trans existence.

[01:01:05]
Trans life as disclosure/nondisclosure

So this is going to be a little, quick and slightly eccentric end to the rant. I was listening to Tom Waits at the time, and found this song hilarious: What’s he building in there? Trans life depends on multiple moments of disclosure and non-disclosure. So, say you’re looking for a sexual partner: do you tell that sexual partner or not something about your trans status? Not disclosing can mean death: the Trans Panic Defense is still a legal defense in some situations. So you don’t tell somebody that you’re trans, and you are, let’s say, a passing trans woman, or a passing trans man, and you’re beginning to engage in sexual activity, and your sexual partner believes they’ve been deceived and murders you. This still happens. This is a part of trans history. Silence equals death. But silence also equals sex, because try disclosing to potential partners that you’re trans and see how many of them run out of the door.

This binary, silence equals death / silence equals sex, I’m stealing from a gay activist. [Ed: his name is Jordan Arsenault, and you should have put that on the slide.] “Silence = Death”, you might know as a very provocative poster from the AIDS crisis: not talking about AIDS meant death for people with AIDS, mostly gay men, but not entirely. Recently, a Canadian artist came out with a new poster that said “Silence = Sex” to talk about serophobia. He’s HIV positive. He will say, you know, I’m trying to be very responsible and tell everyone that I’m HIV positive, but, as soon as I disclose that, my possible sexual partner runs out the door. So this act of disclosure is… that inhibits disclosure, right?

Similarly, trans life in the world that we live in, in the anglosphere at least, has been constantly mediated through this act of trans autobiography. Trans autobiography is a whole genre of literature where we reveal our operations, our details about ourselves. It’s this kind of striptease that continues off the stage onto the page. Like, you write an autobiography for a prurient cis audience, saying, “This is what’s happened in my life.This is the way that I’m trans. This is my revelation to the world.”

What Caitlyn Jenner did is completely indistinguishable, as a media event, from what Christine Jorgensen did about 50 years earlier. Like, it felt it felt like going in loops: this moment of dramatic revelation to the world. “Call Me Cait” is a moment of revelation to the world. But, while this public act of trans autobiography continues to happen, a lot of trans art has actually always been about concealment, as with Rae Bourbon. Confusing things, making people not really know what’s going on in there: What’s he building in there? We have a right to know. But I’m not going to tell you. People want to know what’s under your skirts. And you might want to tell them, but a lot of trans art has been about refusing to tell people what’s under your skirts or your binder.

This is no replayed on Time Magazine, but also on Twitter. I’m fascinated by this moment that we’ve hit on Twitter where young trendy queer people will list all of their marginal affiliations, and so you know their pronouns, you know which particular minority groups they belong to, so you can see which conversations they’re allowed to have and which conversations they’re not allowed to have. This dramatic disclosure that happens at the moment that you see a person, your pronoun badges — [whispering] I hate pronoun badges so much [Ed: Get over it.] — you go around in a circle, and so you have this moment of disclosure, and yet also on Twitter you can have this dramatic non-disclosure of multiple accounts, of bots, of concealing aspects of your identity in order to be able to say things.

And then the last version of this disclosure/non-disclosure that’s worth referencing — and I know I’m just like piling a bunch of cultural signifiers at you just to give you something to think about that’s totally different at the end. How do you get information, specifically health care information, to people who need it, without damaging access to services? So say you’ve got a transmasculine friend who desperately needs access to testosterone, can’t wait the three years it’s going to take him to get the GIC appointment: you need him to know where he can get testosterone from. You know where he can get testosterone from, but if you post it on Twitter that testosterone is going to vanish, right? So you have to get that information to him, but you have to exclude access to that information from other people. There’s all sorts of, in Fred Moten’s terms, “undercommons”: there’s all sorts of hidden realms of knowledge in the trans community that you need people to know exist. You need our people to know it exists, but you don’t want anybody else to know exists because letting people know that it exists is damaging.

One of the most supportive GPs in the UK for trans people is Helen Webberley. She’s also a campaigning GP. Because she’s a campaigning GP she got barred for six months on having clients who were under 16, I think [Ed: the details are a bit fuzzy: here’s their statement], because she was one of the easiest ways for people who are under 16 to get access to hormone blockers, but, because she was publicly available as that, that got shut down for a while. So: disclosure / non-disclosure.

[01:06:35]
Cultural Protocol as Infosec

What life is made possible by excluding access to information and participation? Not by including everyone, not by saying everyone’s welcome, but by saying “You can’t come to this. This behavior is not welcome. You don’t have access to this information.” (Infosec is a trendy term for information security, as in, who do you need to know stuff?) The ceremony may not be recorded, the dinner may not be attended, the meeting may not be declared, you know it’s happening but you don’t know what’s happening.

So this term “cultural protocol” is something that I know from doing some projects with indigenous people, mostly in North America, Turtle Island. There are often ceremonies in that context that cannot be recorded and must not be recorded and should not be recorded, that you only know what happens in that ceremony if you have the right to know what happens in that ceremony, and to record that information is to do cultural damage, is to do something terribly wrong.

The meeting may not be declared: if you’re involved in, let’s say, militant anti-fascism, you need to get a bunch of people together to talk about what you’ve got to do, because the Scottish Defence League is turning up on the Royal Mile tomorrow, but you can only have the right people there, because if the police know you’re there then you can’t do the thing that you need to do. So you need to know that the meeting’s happening if you need to know that the meeting’s happening. If you don’t need to know that the meeting’s happening, you shouldn’t know that the meeting’s happening. If you do know the meeting’s happening, but we’re not sure about you, you should know that it’s happening but not know what’s going on in it. That was sort of deliberately confusing.

So, the suggestion here is that, against the idea of the total Global Commons — and I really shouldn’t have tried to squeeze in this idea about information alongside all this stuff around access, but whatever, this is an early bunch of ideas, and I hope you like them — against this idea of a total Global Commons, against a universal liberal project of borderless capitalism (borders for people, no borders for money), against the idea that everyone can be included, we can suggest that some information does not want to be free, some spaces do not want to be safe, some things you should not have access to.

The implication here is that that we’re defining, from the margins, our own borders and our own boundaries in order to destroy the borders and boundaries of the state. It’s not utopia — it’s the opposite of utopia — but it is idealistic. We’re not trying to create a no-place, a happy no-place where everyone can be included. We are trying, idealistically, to redefine, to reshape, to remake what reality is through processes, not of inclusion, but through deliberate and chosen exclusion.

The strangest thing happened in the Lerwick Tescos, where I stocked up on basics for a month staying at Sumburgh Head: when the person at the till asked if I’d like some boxes to carry everything in, she called me “du”. I hadn’t heard the familiar and informal “you”, pronounced “thu” in Orkney, addressed to me in casual speech, for maybe twenty years. I remember it as perfectly ordinary when I was younger (when I was peedie, corrects my mind), living in Westray (not on, corrects my mind), but when I’m home in Orkney now I never hear it, not with my half-in-half-out accent as a prompt, and definitely not in Tescos. Hearing it then felt like finding a diamond on the pavement, and over the next month I gathered pockets full of diamonds, because, again, it was perfectly ordinary.

I was in Shetland partly to retreat and work on my own Orkney language book, and partly to read, listen to and speak about as much of the Shetland language as I could, to find out what was happening there and what, maybe, other language revitalisation projects could learn from it. There were other things than the precious Tescos Du that struck me, sometimes astonished me. I went to Shetland ForWirds annual concert, which featured three or four generations of Shetland speakers in poetry, theatre and song, and had an audience of a couple of hundred. (The ForWirds website is stuffed full of resources and activity.) I burrowed through the Shetland section of the Lerwick library, which had around three times as many books in dialect, mostly poetry and storytelling but plenty other besides, as the same section in Kirkwall’s. One book, Bjorn Sandison’s children’s novel Mystery at Da Laird’s Haa, is the most fluid and natural Scots prose I’ve ever read, without ever compromising on the integrity of the tongue: with a vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation that’s substantially different than the Orcadian I grew up with, I was amazed at how easy I found it to read, and put that down to the strength of the language around me.

I had the conversation about why the language seems stronger in Shetland than Orkney several times with different folk, and never were we able to pin it down exactly. Perhaps it’s to do with Shetland’s greater distance and Orkney’s greater involvement with global trade and colonisation, but given that both have a roughly 50/50 population of born and new islanders, or those with and without the local language, or however you want to name us, I think that’s probably a small part of the picture.

Reading Mark Ryan Smith’s Literature of Shetland, I’m struck by how unbroken the canon of published dialect work is. After Walter Traill Dennison’s Orcadian Sketchbook, apart from the too-neglected Christina Costie and Robert Rendall, there’s little to nothing in Orkney until the 1980s, while equivalent work in Shetland is followed by much more original authorship all the way through the 20th century. The role of the New Shetlander in fostering the local literature seems crucial. Some folk I spoke to wondered whether the popular success of George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir, who both chose English, and the latter of whom wrote against Scots, overshadowed local language writing and made us feel it wasn’t suitable for literary work. There was a question of whether a greater focus on Shetlanders writing for Shetlanders, rather than for a Central Belt audience, strengthened the tongue.

The dictionary work also occurred earlier and more comprehensively in Shetland, and by language partisans, whereas Hugh Marwick’s Orkney Norn was focussed on recording rather than revitalising, and Gregor Lamb’s Orkney Wordbook came later on, with the more accessible Orkney Dictionary with Margaret Flaws only in the 1990s. John Graham’s work also came with a complete grammar of Shetland, which helps legitimise it, whereas the grammar notes in the Orkney Dictionary are little and late, and we still have no complete record of the grammar of the language. The same battles in the education system — some trying to stamp out the language, some seeking to preserve it — happened in both island groups, but perhaps Shetland had a larger arsenal to deploy.

None of which is to say that there’s not exciting and enlivening work happening in Orkney. Hansel Co-operative Press, so engaged in Shetland’s language work, has also included Orcadian writing in its publications, and now Abersee Press is driving local publishing forward. Our dictionary’s online now, Scottish PEN’s Many Voices project supported local writers with a workshop that I hear’s still going, and I see more Orcadian written down now than I did twenty years ago, even if I hear less. Following the success of Shetland’s Wir Midder Tongue Facebook group, the Orkney Reevlers group has spent over a year now recording local language, encouraging folk to use it without fear or shame, and so has produced an invaluable record and piece of revitalisation: thanks, moderators.

I am feart, though, as many who love minority languages are, even in Shetland which is likely the strongest bastion of a minority Germanic language in these islands. Faced with global media, changing populations, aye-bidan stigmatisation, chronic underfunding, generational shifts, and all the other muddle of a changing world, it’s not always easy to see how the tongue you love can survive — or how it can adapt to new circumstances while retaining as much of what you love as it can. One thing I think about often is that this may depend on reaching a good accommodation between Orkney and English speakers, just as the survival of small islands depends on born islanders accepting some change and difference and new islanders adapting to and respecting the island history. Alison Miller, in an essay for Abersee’s Speak for Yourself, wrote courageously about the strange split in Orkney literature, where Orkney language work tends to be confined to community events like Harvest Homes and weddings and Young Farmers concerts, and English language work tends to be confined to authorised literary events where, worryingly, Orkney speakers are often neither seen nor heard; she points out that an anti-Orkney language prejudice can still often be heard and puts up barriers. Of course I, half Orkney and half not, would say this: to live in a muddled identity you have to bring the parts of it together somehow. But I can’t help thinking that the only way the language survives is the way the islands survive: being a bit of both, with native speakers and learned speakers both allowing each other to speak without shame.

I want to see, and be part of, more events and more books in Orkney that celebrate the language, til we can build them up to rival the scale of our Shetland cousins. I also dream of a revitalisation of the dictionary work, now that we’re digital, to help develop fuller grammars and records of spellings and keeps the words circulating: dictionary work that keeps the language living rather than pins it to the page. After spending a month up in the lighthouse, I also hope for more collaboration and traffic between the different islands and their languages: meeting with members of the ForWirds team, we dreamed up at least a dozen fantasy projects, from bilingual events to interisland translations, that are just waiting on a bit of money and a bit of energy to push them forward. On we go.